by Mark Dery
Inevitably, you and your partner decide to retire to the virtual boudoir. After activating the CREATE PRIVATE ROOM program, you zap the bedchamber’s name and password to your partner via private message; within seconds, both of you have rendezvoused onscreen. Hunched over your computer keyboards, separated by a sea of wires, you tap out erotic messages that materialize, like spirit writing, as glowing characters on each other’s screens. Soon, you find yourself typing with one hand. Coitus in cyberspace, like intercourse in the physical world, progresses from foreplay to climax; orgasms are signaled by cartoony exclamations: “ohhhhhh,” “WOW!!!” and the perennial favorite “I’mmmm Commmmmmmminnnggggggggg!!!!!!”
According to the Wired contributor Gerard Van Der Leun, text sex dates back to “the dawn of on-line.” Branwyn cites three types of “text-based sexual exchanges” in his South Atlantic Quarterly essay “Compu-Sex: Erotica for Cybernauts.” Most common, he reports, are sexually explicit descriptions of what each participant is purportedly doing. Another variety, favored by orgy-goers, involves the communal creation of sexual fantasies, a form of consensual world-building reminiscent of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Such scenarios, notes Branwyn, require the nimble negotiation of the inconsistencies that inevitably result when stories are collectively improvised by scattered strangers. Branwyn imagines a narrative with a short circuit, and a quick fix:
BethR types: “I’m climbing on top of Rogerl04,” not noticing that Roger 104 has just stated that he is having sex standing up, in the corner, with Nina5. To work around this story “violation,” Roger 104 might type: “Nina and I get so worked up, we roll onto the floor. As Nina5 falls off of me, the always randy BethR, not missing a beat, climbs on top of me.”47
Finally, there is what Branwyn wryly calls “teleoperated compu-sex,” the preferred mode among couples who swing on-line. “Teleoperation” is the computer control of remote robots by human operators; teleoperated sex, by extension, involves the acting out, by one party, of instructions given by another, far removed: “Sal, I want you to slurp grape jelly out of Frieda’s navel. . . .”
Sex among the disembodied is wondrous strange, as are the issues it raises. In an E-mail message, Branwyn described an encounter with an online prostitute who offered to have text sex with him in exchange for an illegal copy of a computer game. There are laws against software piracy, but is online prostitution, in which bodies never touch and no fluids are exchanged, illegal or even immoral? In fact, does the term prostitution even apply to sex-for-software barter when the “sex” in question consists of what the Esquire writer Michael Hirschorn calls “techno-onanism” -pornographic E-mail zapping back and forth between furiously masturbating users?
Stranger still is the notion of on-line adultery: Should significant others be jealous of their partners’ on-line indiscretions? “If you have Virtual sex’ with someone,” writes a user (who prefers to remain anonymous) in the WELL’s “Text Sex” topic, “is that in essence . . . cheating on your [significant other] . . . or more like interactive fantasy? And if you have an ongoing virtual relationship, is that in effect an affair?” Susan E. Fernbach doesn’t think so. “If the [on-line] involvement brings something extra to the primary relationship, then it’s probably healthy,” she writes. “If it drains energy from the primary relationship, there might be . . . a problem.”48
Text sex is stealth sex, performed by unseen, unseeing participants whose identities are masked by the medium. Because on-line communication reduces human interaction to symbols hammered out on QWERTY keyboards, it effectively masks gender, a vertiginous state of affairs that some find liberating and others profoundly disconcerting. Victor Lukas confirms,
Sex in cyberspace happens in a VERY surreal landscape! The phenomenon of males masquerading as females is quite widespread, but oddly enough, it is not necessarily an indication of gay preference. I introduced my male office mate, a shy man with a bit of an inferiority complex, to . . . Compuserve. [S]ince he wasn’t a verbally skilled person, he had difficulty making friends or finding conversation partners. . . . On a whim, he changed to a female handle, and suddenly he was “popular.”49
Users who pose as members of the opposite gender are commonly known as “MorFs.” The term, short for “male or female,” is also a pun on “morphing,” the computer animation technique used to seamlessly dissolve one image into another. Not everyone adjusts easily to the notion of gender morphing, an observation amply-and amusingly-evidenced in one of Branwyn’s posts:
Things sometimes get real weird on AOL with people arguing over a person’s true gender. The other night a “woman” was accused by another “woman” of not being a woman. She thought the “woman” in question was too aggressive to be a woman. The “woman” in question gave her phone number to several people so that they could call to hear her voice. After doing so, a “man” verified that “she” sounded like a female. The “woman” who had raised the allegations was not impressed. “She” said that lots of TVs sound like women. Someone then asked “her” how we were to know that SHE was a woman. “She” said that there were images of her available for downloading. Funny how she thought this was somehow more solid evidence than the other person’s phone voice. She said she could also fax people pix of her. Wild!50
To those endowed not with bulging abs or plunging cleavage but overdeveloped brains, group gropes and one-night stands between discar-nate minds look a lot like Utopia. In a private note to Branwyn, one devotee wrote, “In compu-sex, being able to type fast and write well is equivalent to having great legs or a tight butt in the real world.” Linda Hardesty, a participant in the WELL’s “Sex in Virtual Communities” topic, offers a more romantic perspective on the subject:
The idea of falling in love with a person purely through writing seems to me to cast some light on the whole concept of falling in love. We do tend to fall in love with some image of the person that we have created in our own minds. Ways that people react on-line, coupled with one’s own conditioning, create that image.51
The narrow bandwidth of on-line communication strikes some as erotic in itself. The mental image Hardesty mentions derives its seductive power from the same source tapped by Muslim veils that conceal all but the eyes: the delicious mystery of the unseen. Then, too, to a true logophile, the written word can be almost aphrodisiacal. “[S]ex at best *is* a conversation,” writes “Afterhours (gail),”
and virtual *intercourse* is what the WELL can be when it’s working. . . . we want our words to stroke one another, envelop one another, move one another. . . . What Hank said is true. Falling in love with writers is easy. The difference here is that you can intertwine words with the writers you love, interactive and expressive and responding to your ideas.52
Alan L. Chamberlain, another WELL user, suggests that on-line, among the bodiless, the mind is an erogenous zone:
[I] have friendships and unspecified relationships with women i have met through the WELL, where . . . the attraction began as a result of exposure to each other’s ideas, rather than physical attraction, in some instances, there has been a physical attraction following, but the fundamental thing has been attraction to each other’s minds.53
Getting ItOn(-Line): MUD Sex, Net.Sleazing, and Beyond
Not all netsurfers are as platonic-or as logophilic-as Chamberlain and his fellow WELL-dwellers. There is a fast-growing underground of adult BBSs, of which Event Horizons, with sixty-four phone lines and twenty-five thousand users, is possibly the most popular and undoubtedly the oldest (Event’s president, Jim Maxey, claims his was the first adult BBS). Most adult BBSs feature electronic conferencing, which permits users to comment on various topics; many, like the New York-based Aline or Monrovia, California’s Odyssey, specialize in X-rated “chat,” or real-time teleconferencing, where a number of users congregate in an imaginary room to engage in group conversation via keyboard. A classified ad for Lifestyle BBS entices potential subscribers with the promise of
[c]
omputer sex talk: couples and singles interested in making real contacts with very open-minded adults meet on the nationwide Lifestyle BBS. 32 lines serve 1,500+ active members more than 1,300 times a day.54
Some sexually explicit BBSs cater to gays and lesbians. Frank Browning describes two typical gay computer bulletin boards:
One board calls itself “Station House” and organizes its user codes around the jargon of the police. Each user, identified as an “officer,” is on “patrol” in a numbered “car,” and chooses from several topical areas labeled as “squad rooms.” Another bulletin board is called “Backdoor”; on-line users slip into “glory holes” and choose among topical “stalls.”55
On the Internet, one finds systems that are home to MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons, Dimensions, or Domains) and MUSEs (Multi-User Simulation Environments)-text-based role-playing games that enable multiple users to simultaneously explore a shared environment. Assuming fanciful guises, players engage in derring-do in labyrinthine caverns, enchanted forests, and similarly otherworldly geographies, all spun from narrative threads (the eye-zapping computer graphics and ray-gun sound effects familiar from video arcades or PC games are absent here). “When you encounter other characters, the interactions between you become part of the game,” writes Howard Rheingold, in “What Are Muds and Muses?” an article published on the WELL. “People gather treasure, slay monsters (and each other), gain experience points, and thereby become wizards, with powers that are useful in playing the game.”
There are those, however, whose idea of game playing includes carnal frolickings; increasingly, unbridled lust is intruding on the sword-and-sorcery scenarios of these Tolkienesque worlds. “Flirtation, infatuation, romance, and even TinySex’ are now as ubiquitous in MUD worlds as on real college campuses,” write Rheingold and Kevin Kelly, in the July/August 1993 issue of Wired magazine. According to the WELL user Tim Oren, TinySex (alternately, “tinysex”) is “sexually loaded or explicit language . . . typed between users on a MUD or other multi-user system. I suppose it got called ‘TinySex’ because some of the original systems were called Tiny-MUDs.”56 As Rheingold notes in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, it is conducted in character. Rheingold also makes mention of net.sleazing, which he defines as “the practice of aggressively soliciting mutual narrative stimulation . . . an unsavory but perennially popular behavior in MUDland.”57 Taken further, net.sleazing turns to MUD-rape, which the feminist cultural critic Anne Balsamo defines as an “unwanted, aggressive, sexual-textual encounter in a multi-user domain.”58
Julian Dibbell is more sanguine about on-line orgasms than most. “Netsex,” to Dibbell, is
possibly the headiest experience the very heady world of MUDs has to offer. Amid flurries of even the most cursorily described caresses, sighs, and penetrations, the glands do engage, and often as throbbingly as they would in a real-life assignation-sometimes even more so, given the combined power of anonymity and textual suggestiveness to unshackle deep-seated fantasies.59
Visual Aids
A burgeoning subculture of netsex enthusiasts is unsatisfied with the purely literary medium of text sex. Using electronic devices called scanners, they convert pornographic images into digital data that can then be stored in their computer memories and traded, on-line, for other digitized images. Adult BBSs often feature photo libraries, the entries in which can be saved, with a few commands, in the memory of the user’s computer. More mainstream BBSs permit the public posting of soft-core material only; subscribers interested in steamier fare must contact individual users, who trade X-rated files privately, via E-mail. By storing images as digitally encoded graphics files called .GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) files, users are able to transmit them: One user sends, and as the computer on the receiving end decodes the file, bit by digital bit, a more or less photo-quality image blooms slowly on the screen of the willing recipient. Users claiming to be professional photographers sometimes list their libraries of digitized photos, and Nixpix, a free BBS that claims to have more than ten thousand subscribers, provides global access to pornographic photos, ranging in professionalism from Peeping Tom to studio quality.
Not all .GIF transmissions are as laughably banal as the digitized Playboy photos one WELL user claims have been ubiquitous “for years,” circulated by “horny nerds.”60 On March 4,1993, federal agents raided forty locations in fifteen states in a search for evidence against subscribers who paid eighty dollars a year to receive explicit photos of five-to-twelve-year-old children from an on-line child pornography ring based in Denmark. Dubbed Operation Longarm, the coordinated effort sprang from the federal Customs Service’s assertion that the “computerized transmission of illegal pornography among pedophiles is rapidly becoming more popular than smutty magazines.”61 The raids have yielded two indictments; an investigation into what officials believe is a worldwide child pornography network continues. In July 1995, a self-appointed vigilante and the FBI joined forces in an Internet sting that resulted in the indictment of a forty-five-year-old male Prodigy user on the charge of crossing state lines with the intention of having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl.
Given the uninformed demagoguery that passes for political debate on this subject, it must be noted that the perception of the Internet as an electronic Sodom awash in hard-core porn and overrun by predatory pedophiles is unfounded. During a July 21,1995, debate on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Bruce Taylor, the president of the National Law Center for Children and Families in Fairfax, Virginia, asserted that the Internet is “full” of “hardcore porn pictures” involving “violence and animals and torture and body functions.” Larry Magid, the author of a booklet called Child Safety on the Information Highway, countered, “If I knew nothing about the Internet and I were listening to this broadcast, I would think . . . that you turn on the Internet and all of a sudden you encounter pictures of naked people having sex with animals. . . . I really resent the word ‘full’; despite some infamous studies, pornography represents a very, very small percentage of the total [Internet traffic].”
Magid was referring to the widely criticized (and utterly discredited) Carnegie-Mellon study of on-line pornography that Philip Elmer-Dewitt used as the factual foundation of his June 26,1995, Time feature on pornography on the Internet. According to the New York Times, the study, which claimed that 83.5 percent of all images on UseNet are pornographic, has been criticized as “a poorly designed survey whose main conclusion . . . could not be supported by the research methods employed.”62 In fact, as the journalist Brock Meeks has pointed out, the study’s own figures show that “so-called ‘pornographic’ images comprise merely one-half of one percent (.5) of all Internet traffic.”63
But whether or not pornography, pedophilic or otherwise, is rampant on the Internet, the exchange of nonpedophilic nude photos between consenting adults as a prelude to text sex is both legal and popular. “You contact somebody, exchange images that are allegedly of the two of you, and then, once you have the image viewable, you’re ready to ‘talk things over,’ “explained Branwyn, in an E-mail note. On-line demand is growing for amateur (or at least ostensibly amateur) porn that parallels the off-line market in so-called “amateur” adult videos (many of which are professionally produced). “Tau Zero (tauzero)” assured a user who wondered if “people are exchanging still or video clip files of themselves,”
It happens, alright. On CompuServe the user interface includes direct support for displaying, uploading, downloading, and e-mailing color images. In the CB community there, a fair amount of images are exchanged-and while [many of them are] scanned from magazines and digitized from videos, there is an increasing amount of. . . -quite- explicit self-portraiture. In addition to near real-time digital exchange[s], people also send polaroids and such by conventional physical mail once they have found intimacy via “narrow ascii” and by voice. There is [an] interesting stew of mixed media used in the service of sexuality by those who inhabit cyberspace!64
The
“CB community” to which Tau Zero refers is a group of users who communicate via CompuServe’s real-time chat feature; they are an online version of the CB (citizens band) radio subculture that flourished in the seventies. ASCII-pronounced “askee”–is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, the generic text format required by most BBSs; it is deemed “narrow” because the absence of italics, underlining, boldface, and other print options inhibit dramatic emphasis.
More and more, Tau Zero’s “stew of mixed media” is served up on CD-ROMs-shiny silver wafers whose grooves can store text, photos and illustrations, film footage, animated graphics, and sounds. A user whose computer is equipped with a CD-ROM drive can interact with the onscreen world-a world enhanced by the music, speech, and sound effects seeping out of the speaker on the back of his computer–by pointing and clicking a mouse or pecking out keyboard commands.
Compilations of nude stills and adult films have become staples of the CD-ROM genre. Space Coast Software’s groaningly titled Bare Assets (“See the models dance on the beach, splash in the pool, and . . . strip”) utilizes QuickTime software to bring video clips to life. Romulus Entertainment’s House of Dreams enjoyed the distinction of being the first full-length digital movie, albeit a rather unsatisfying one: The image appears in a claustrophobic window on the user’s screen, and the action is noninteractive.
It is widely held that interactivity will spur the growth of new media. “At the moment,” says Bruce Sterling, “it’s still a fascinating idea that you can actually put a dirty picture on your computer screen. But by itself, it won’t be amazing for very long.”65 Sexually explicit CD-ROMs and software that enable the user to select characters, peel away layers of clothing, and rewrite story lines as they unfold realize, in a manner few would have predicted and some would have reviled, the dream of interactivity chased by the Czech Pavilion’s Kino-Automat at Expo ’67 in Montreal. Fairgoers watched One Man and His World, a movie with alternate climaxes whose final outcome was determined by audience vote: Should the wife or the blond neighbor commit suicide? Should the male protagonist go to jail or go free?
